Like obviously not for newer cutting edge games but for newer indie games and older AAA games?
You must log in or # to comment.
Yeah, as long as you’re not too concerned about load time, then an old HDD is still fine.
I’m an addict. I have a ton of games on my computer. I have 4 NVMe drives and that isn’t enough to hold all my games. So I have smaller indie games and older games like L4D2 on my old school 4TB HDD. No ragrets.
Personally I use my hard drive for storing large games that I’m not actively playing (to be moved back to an SSD when I do), small games (<15GB) where the load times won’t be super long, games with distinct levels with loading screens (hard drives suck for open-world games that stream in assets during play), and games that are just too stupidly large to comfortably fit on my SSD (like freaking ARK, which takes up several hundred gigabytes with the DLC installed).
One thing I haven’t seen mentioned is that the delta-patching used by Steam’s updater can take ages on a hard drive due to all the random read-writes. Small games (a few gigabytes) can be uninstalled and redownloaded in less time than it’d take to update them. I would avoid putting games that update frequently on your hard drive for this reason.
I have literally only ever seen 2 games that required an SSD in their minimum requirement specs: Starfield and the Oblivion Remaster.
So you’re probably good if you don’t plan on playing any newer Bethesda games 🤷🏻♂️
Although not required, most games benefit massively from being played off a SSD .
World of tanks for example, an SSD is the difference between loading in during the count down. Or showing up in game after the match has already started…
Rust
BG3 requires an SSD
I still run a lot of my games off of spinning rust. Boot times are a little bit longer, but at least i can store a ton of games.
I use HDD for those <5GB sized games which hasn’t failed me yet.
I would at least take SATA SSD nowadays as it’s pretty cheap but honestly I can’t see myself go back to SATA after having enjoyed M.2 SSDs for years now.
If you want 8TB of storage I can see why HDD would be great but for 2TB or less SSD are accessible if not cheap.
You can move things to and from different drives in the steam settings pretty easily, so in the past I used to archive larger games I was not playing to a large HDD on my system to avoid having to download it all again.
When I wanted to play again I moved it back to my SSD.
Yes, especially with a big wad of RAM. Exceptions exist, however.
Yup, I have a 500gb HDD for Steam Games, loading screens are a few seconds longer than you would expect but that just makes time for a beer break.
The short answer is yes. A high rpm HDD like a Western Digital Black or a Seagate Barracuda will game just fine. Obviously your performance will vary depending on the game but it’s never going to be unplayable. Faster load times are nice but I have never seen a load screen take longer than a 30 ish seconds at most, even on newer titles.
I don’t like putting games on my ssds, just a waste of space to me
Some indie games and AAA games from 10 years ago should be fine.
That being said, SSD costs are low enough these days that you should be able to play off an SSD.
Yeah I know, thing is I have a lonely, sad 1TB HDD from 2008 that somehow still works and I thought it would be a shame to not game with it. I want it to spend its final years gaming with me. I know, I’m weird. Once it dies, I’l probably get a SATA SSD. I have an M.2 SSD but it’s almost full.
HDDs don’t usually affect the performance of a game or how it operates so they’re fine even for newer games, the only thing it’ll change is that you’ll have significantly slower loading times
Old games and indie are mostly fine. Anything newer or open world and you’ll need a SSD or a level 2 cache at least. NOTE: this only applies to CMR hard disks, SMR hard disks are unusable.
